Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [235]
The three retreated to the lavatory, where Payton lit into his assistants. “Why the fuck is Connie here?” he screamed. “Who the fuck told her to come to my press conference? Which one of you fucking did this?”
Tucker was irritated and in pain. She had spent the previous six hours finalizing Walter’s speech, and the last thing she needed was a lecture. “You know what, Walter,” she shouted. “It’d be much easier to deal with this if you were divorced! If you had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this problem right now, would we?”
There was nothing Payton could say. He marched out of the bathroom and sat down at the middle of a long brown table adorned with a black-and-white radio station banner. Jarrett, wearing a plaid shirt, sat to his right. Connie, dressed in black, sat to his left—and Walter barely looked her way. As always, dark sunglasses guarded Walter’s eyes. A black leather jacket hung from his shoulders. He gripped a white microphone with his right hand and, in that familiar high-pitched voice, spoke about contracting a disease that, until recently, he had never heard of. “I can’t lay around and mope around and just hope everything is going to be OK,” he said. “I’m still moving and grooving.”
Asked if he was scared, Payton didn’t flinch. “Hell yeah, I’m scared,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be scared? What can you do? I mean, like I said, it’s not in my hands anymore. It’s in God’s hands, and if it’s meant for me to go on and to be around, I’ll be around.”
Over the course of the decade the media had been presented with a couple of similar situations. In 1991 Magic Johnson held a press conference to announce he had contracted the HIV virus. Four years later Mickey Mantle, his body ravaged by a lifetime of alcoholism, also met with the media to discuss the inoperable liver cancer that facilitated his need for a transplant. Both of those moments were memorable and, in the context of superstar athletes, shocking. Yet Johnson’s disease could be chalked up to unprotected sex, and Mantle’s to the bottle. Here was Payton, a shell of his former self, seemingly the victim of bad luck. “There was some unspoken comfort level in knowing that [Johnson and Mantle] had brought it on themselves,” Bud Shaw wrote in the following day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Not so with Payton.”
Toward the end, Jiggetts asked Payton if there was anything he wanted to tell his fans. Payton’s hands began to shake. He put his head on his son’s shoulder and began to cry. “To the people that really care about me, just continue to pray,” he said. “And for those who are going to say what they want to say, may God be with you also.”
Immediately after the press conference, Payton headed for O’Hare Airport to catch the forty-minute flight back to Rochester for some tests. He called Tucker and asked her to meet him outside the terminal to bring him some material. When she arrived, Tucker was shocked by what she saw: There stood Walter Payton, alongside his curbside car, moving to the music blasting from his speakers. “He looked so peaceful and so happy,” she said. “He said he was spending some time with God and he felt like dancing.”
Later that night Larry King, famed host of CNN’s Larry King Live, left a message at Payton’s office. “Walter,” he said, “Larry King here. Listen, I’m not calling to get you on the show. I’m calling to give you my home number if you want to talk as friends [the two had never actually met], and just to let you know that I’m thinking about you and I want to make sure you’re OK.”
When the sentiment was relayed to Payton, he told Tucker, “Call Larry King and tell him I’ll do the show.” On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 3, Tucker and Payton returned to O’Hare to fly to New York. Payton was dressed normally—jeans, collared shirt, thick jacket, sunglasses. Yet as he strode through the terminal, something staggering took place: Absolutely nothing. Nobody requested